Today's Stichomancy for Abraham Lincoln

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll:

coal-scuttles. `I hope you're a good hand at pinning and tying strings?' Tweedledum remarked. `Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.'

Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life--the way those two bustled about-- and the quantity of things they put on--and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons--`Really they'll be more like bundles of old clothes that anything else, by the time they're ready!' she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, `to keep his head from being cut off,' as he said.

Through the Looking-Glass

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw:

awkward, slow-witted, slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly, nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a pretext for punishing him.

My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle examined me and discovered that the net result of my

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott:

marble figure and the living suppliant. At length, the large drops which gathered on his eye-lashes compelled him to draw his hand across them.

"I thought," he said, "that tears and I had done; but we shed them at our birth, and their spring dries not until we are in our graves. But no melting of the heart shall dissolve my resolution. I part here, at once, and for ever, with all of which the memory" (looking to the tomb), "or the presence" (he pressed Isabella's hand), "is dear to me.--Speak not to me! attempt not to thwart my determination! it will avail nothing; you will hear of and see this lump of deformity no more. To you

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov:

your mind to speak evil of me, take a knife instead and cut my throat. I think you would not find that a very difficult matter."

"Am I like an assassin, then?" . . .

"You are worse" . . .

I fell into thought for a moment; then, assuming a deeply moved air, I said:

"Yes, such has been my lot from very child- hood! All have read upon my countenance the marks of bad qualities, which were not existent; but they were assumed to exist -- and they were